


Unsung

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 15:15:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21255422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: One of the Fallen, the Dark Angel's secret shame, comes to a forgotten world in search of truth and power - and finds an opponent of familiar stripe awaiting him...





	Unsung

Cimer is running.

He has been running for a long time, now.

Hours? Oh yes. Certainly hours. Scrabbling under fallen statues of nameless, faceless saints. Stamping his bootprints into flagstone and ferrocrete to mislead his pursuers, without success. Leaving scraps of his midnight cape on mantles, on forked paths, to be blown by the rising wind, to scatter by the whim of fate.

Fate has not been kind. Cimer can feel his hunter, still, as though the two are connected by some invisible cord. Like a hook is caught in his jaw, and his struggles are meaningless.

Days, then? Without doubt. Cimer has played his cards poorly, tipped his hand too early. As soon as he had stepped through the twisted paths that led to this world he knew he had been mistaken. Whether the portents had been wrong, whether the alignments had changed, whether he had simply misread the play of runes -- it mattered not. Perhaps his dark masters had, as was their wont, flung him into another of their capricious and unknowable tests.

Power always had a price. It attracted others like carrion feeders to a fresh kill. And why had Cimer come to this border-world, this cracked rock, if not to seek power at the very wingtips of the two-headed eagle? Power was a flame. If you could reach in at the right angle- If you could draw your hand back fast enough- you could obtain, perhaps, a prized ember.

Years, is it? Cimer could recall each and every one, the fading sparks, the ash falling through his fingers. A feeling that has harried him for much of his life: a second late. A choice poorly made. The consequences. The loss. He pauses for a moment, his hooded face lifted to the dark clouds above, shaken from his flight by the growing scent of deep pine, torn bark and honeyed sap.

“Not now,” he growls to the shadows that play across the open-air concourse. “Not ever. I will not be your effigy any more than I was his.”

Millenia separates Cimer from Caliban, yet he cannot escape it any more than he can shake the ignorant hounds who snap at his heels. If they but knew- If only he could show them-

But ten thousand years has murdered the sense of his gene-brothers. It has blinded them, deafened them, made them incapable. Impotent. Cimer takes no pleasure in slaying those sent to bring him to confession within the Rock’s bloodied oubliettes. They have suffered under a tyrant’s legacy for so long that they have grown to welcome their chains and bondage.

It is almost a mercy to end their fruitless search now before they discover the depths of the Lion’s lies. They die ignorant but innocent of their father’s sins.

The shadows whisper, a council of cowled informants. Cimer straightens from his half-crouch: there is no point running any longer. The Watchers have their eyes upon him, directing his pursuers through a mixture of psychic influence and waking visions. As long as the vile guardian spirits of the Dark Angels remain, Cimer will know no peace, no escape. Their very presence interferes with the sorcerous incantations required to escape this snare, and he cannot afford to attack them directly when a kill-team is so close.

Cimer’s lip curls in ageless contempt as the robed shadows reform on columns and collonades around him. The eternal cowards. They dare not act themselves, but rather through misguided vassals -- those who would, without their interference, be his brothers.

“Flee,” he snarls, “Run as you always do. Know that this will not stop me.”

The Watchers do not respond. They never do.

The crunch of ceramite on rubble, and Cimer turns his attention to his huntsman. It separates itself from a spiral of entwined skeletal martyrs, the bones of martyrs bronzed and twisted. A greyscale cape wrapped around the figure drinks in the dark, blends with it, confusing even the eye of an experienced warrior. Cimer does not catch the tell-tale hiss and thrum of servoes, of power armour drawing energy.

Mastercrafted. And from the self-confident strut, that fighter’s balance tempered by a rogue’s wariness -- no line member of the Unforgiven ranging ahead of his battle-brothers. No champion of the Deathwing, either: Terminator plate could never move with such fluid grace.

For the first time in decades, Cimer allows himself a flicker of emotion. Is his foe one of the Interrogator-Chaplains, then, brought to this dead world to seek personal vengeance against one of the Fallen? Is there an opportunity here -- to redeem a brother, to break the yoke of slavery, to draw back the veil from another set of eyes?

Cimer waits for the ceremonial challenge, for the throwing of the gauntlet, for the cries of blasphemy and the accusations of treachery. He has had many years to perfect his arguments. In some ways, the Fallen are more deadly with their oratory than their weapons.

He is not prepared for the weighted daggers.

The blades are blackened with soot, with grime, with Munitorum boot-polish -- they fly from the dark like creatures born from it, sharp-horned and vile. Cimer caught one on a midnight pauldron, barely ducking the other as it flew past, soundlessly catching the hem of his hood, cutting away a furrow of jet fabric.

They were not the prelude to an attack, nor a diversion to enable a stratagem. They are almost a mockery; a way to ensure Cimer’s opponent has his full attention.

_Such arrogance,_ ran the Fallen’s thoughts, rising from the mire of apathy that he so often found himself caught in, to the first red-rimed edge of anger. _This is no brother of mine, no follower of the Knightly Orders._

The hunter walked closer, unfastening his camo-cape as he came, letting the precious relic flutter from his shoulders to reveal scarred, cut-down black armor. Not the polished obsidian of the Fallen’s armour, not something that bore any relation to that proud tradition of maintenance that ran in an unbroken line to the very formation of the Adeptus Astartes. It was battle-broken with the barest memory of paint in the golden flecks and chips that remained upon the breastplate.

Where Cimer wore his beloved powered armour like an ancient tournament-champion of early Terra, his hunter’s darkness found commonality in the dusty greatcoat of a grim-faced Imperial Commissar. It had nothing of honour to it, nothing of pride, nothing more than the promise of a bolt pistol to the back of a head.

It was an affront. It spat in the face of their transhuman legacy. Cimer bore no love for the Emperor’s dream, nor those who served it, yet it boiled his very blood to see such a terrible fall from grace.

Once, they had been kings, astride the chariot of cosmos. Now they were rabid animals, squalling in the filth and ruin of civilisation.

Their existence would be suffered no longer.

Cimer took the elder stance of his Order, the power sword _Penumbra_ igniting with a pale blue nimbus as it slid from its rubied sheath. Once it had defended the halls and secrets of Caliban, once it had drunk deep of noble blood -- it was too good a death for the curr before Cimer, but death it would bring, sure and inevitable.

The Fallen glanced at the bent shadows atop the columns for a second, his eyes slit by hate. “Is this your champion, then? Is this what you consider worthy? You prove only how right we were to deny your kind.”

“Praying to your gods?” asked the unworthy challenger. Even his voice was foul, like promethium on a clear, pure spring. “No need. You’ll meet them soon enough.”

“My path does not end here. Better than you have tried. I am honour-bound to offer you the chance to depart; you are not the foe I seek, nor one I am oathed to slay.”

The chipped Marine chuckled. “Oaths. Wax, paper, nothing more.”

Cimer moved his guard to match his opponent’s circling, his foe keeping just out of reach of a lunge and leaving himself plenty of room to either advance or retreat. Street fighting was a fine art that encapsulated the entire environment; it was different by far than the practice cages or the blood-pits. It was moments like this that the Adeptus Astartes strove towards, had grappled in since their bloodied birthing on Terra. The silence of a voidship’s tertiary arming deck. In a shell crater on some nameless murderworld. In the very teeth of a rising gale amongst decapitated Imperial statues on a public nave.

These moments were not sung, not spoken of: they were personal encounters, fatal and fated, that affirmed the self-belief of the warrior who walked away victorious. There could be only that, or death. It was not a matter of honour or pride. It was more than an inborn genetic imperative to triumph. It was the very essence of their being.

A fallen angel. A murderer in chipped gold.

Cimer anticipated the first strike: he had measured his opponent in that slow, unhurried walk between the statues, in the cast of those blackened knives. The powder-flecked chain lashed out from where it had been coiled around his opponent’s gauntlet, seeking the soft flesh of Cimer’s unarmoured face.

He stepped through the blow’s apex, raising _Penumbra_ to shear the links and use the Marine’s momentum against him. When the power sword’s aura touched the fines coating the chain, it detonated in a blinding flash, the energy field shorting out in a spectacular failure that sent agonizing feedback up Cimer’s arm, throwing it out in a jerking spasm.

The Fallen barely had time to meet the golden murderer’s charge with his own dagger, quickly drawn, stabbing out to force the man to turn the blade away with his vambraces and a surprised curse.

Cimer followed the opening with a succession of lunges, whirling his inactive blade in a counter pattern. _Penumbra_ lacked its matter-shearing aura, but it still bore an edge that could shear through ceramite with ease. His opponent was a moment faster than the blade, his cut-down armour giving him an agility the Fallen was forced to fight around. Cimer could see the strategy there: if he overextended, his opponent would attempt a wrestler’s lock, or attempt to disarm him.

The dagger prevented the golden Marine from closing, and _Penumbra_ held him on the back foot. So long as he remained pressed, there would be no opportunity to use his superior mobility.

But this was not one of the Lion’s gene-children, a master of tactics and strategy and the old forms of forgotten Caliban who could understand when he was overmatched. Or, indeed, that he _could_ be overmatched. Cimer saw the pattern in the returns start to break; saw the gap that he had been forced into widening. The succession of slips and disengages that had brought them to a particular statue, one of wailing mothers, topped with a black voidship.

Cimer’s opponent seemed to slip on the rubble, a disastrous turn of footwork and chance, inviting the killing blow, the lunge that would take him in the throat or the primary heart. It would take but a step forward to enter that perfect range, to wipe this stain from the world, to win, to prove the superiority of his bloodline-

The Fallen stepped back instead, allowing the golden warrior to recover. Cimer thumbed the activation rune of _Penumbra_ again, and frowned as it sparked but did not ignite. It would take a thorough cleansing and sacred oils to purify the blade and placate the machine-spirit before it could be used again.

His opponent’s breath hissed over the vox, an appreciative gesture. “Smart.”

“Obvious. You revealed yourself only when the trap was set. I am no _grox_ to be herded where you will.”

“You lumber like one.”

“I have no need to exert myself against such thin blood. I am not entirely convinced you are not an upjumped Chapter serf who has stolen their master’s armour.”

Another hiss that might have been laughter. “You kiss up to Khorne with that mouth? Fine.”

The golden Marine drew the hidden blade from where it had been cunningly hidden within the conjoined bodies. It was related to _Penumbra_ only in that once, every sword had been a lump of inert metal needing to be wrested from the bare earth. Long, jagged, brittle -- it was more hacksaw than a weapon of war.

His opponent wielded it as a peasant would a scythe against a noble lord. Inelegant, crude, but deadly. It swung up in a brutal arc toward Cimer’s head, and his parry with _Penumbra_ rattled both blades, shaking the lock before it could be formed.

The battle turned now with both Marines armed, the murderer’s agility tempered by the weight and heft of his weapon, but now giving him an advantage of reach and play. He turned Cimer to his own tune, a dance of uncompromising blows that -- once again -- drew the Fallen into a quick series of ever-widening parries that promised an opening, if only he were quick enough to take it-

It was a lie. Cimer could see that, now, much as the warrior’s battered appearance was a deception. A layer of detritus over something far, far more dangerous. Inconspicuous leaves over a steel vice.

And now he could, focused, read the golden forms.

The shifting grip that mimicked the Order’s own beast-slaying movements. The clearaway cut that novices were felled by, time and time again, in the practice halls. More and more, Cimer felt his opponent more gardener than warrior, each blow as delicate and precise as the pruning of errant flowers. The wildness tamed. The familiar, just out of reach…

_Who?_ Cimer begged his mind for recollection, for the revelation. _Which of the Unforgiven fight with such vital memory of Caliban? Which champion, of which Company? Who passed these secrets down to the Second Founding? Who?_

The lapse cost him everything. The reaching for memory, for a connection to the past he had lost, he had cut away -- the path ended, suddenly, not in shadow, but searing light.

The golden Marine had uncast his final illusion. The slag and scrap adhered to his long blade disintegrated in a flash of superheated plasma, the activation of a dormant power sword. Roses ran in red tracery, backlit by ancient generators embedded in the fullers.

It fell like a star, snapping _Penumbra_ at the mid-length, taking Cimer’s right arm with it, then the left on a backstroke. His hood caught flame as the rose-red sword passed through it.

Cimer’s final vison was of the Watchers above. He fancied he could almost see their faces, as his soul was cleaved as surely as his body. None who knew the tortured Fallen would countenance it, and none would ever find his body -- it would be consigned to the decay of the dead city, to be picked at by scavengers and the marrow broken from the bones, and none would know where his final rest would be -- but he had died with some sense of peace.

The golden warrior stood over his kill for a moment, then looked also to the empty plinths, his eyes narrowing as if he had caught the fading of a cowled, satisfied figure.

Then, Sergeant Bullt of the Marines Malevolent 10th Company wasted no further time in stripping the unfortunate Astartes of his weapons, strapping _Penumbra_ to his back before concealing it with the camo-cloak. He did not know the Chapter of the man he had slain, nor his history, nor his deeds.

Only that heretic plate fit just as well as that made by loyalists.

Only that there was nothing but war.

A fallen angel.

A murderer in gold.


End file.
